ttccomplaints.com

The Toronto Transit Commission has been caught napping. It's not about the unfortunate ticket collector: he's just a scapegoat for a deeper malaise in Toronto. It's February, fares just went up, and in banning token sales during the period of the fare increase, the TTC signalled its customary contempt for its customers: it would be a great transit system, if it wasn't for the passengers.

No, that's not where the TTC has gone off the rails. Its problem has been its failure to appreciate the nature of customer-company discourse in the postmodern age.

The union's aggressive response to TTC customers played right into the hands of the bloggers, tweeters and YouTubers and whipped the situation up into a frenzy. The customer may not be always right, but the customer always wins. When Dave Carroll's guitar was smashed by United Airlines baggage handlers, he wrote a song and posted a video about it on YouTube last July. It was an instant hit, reaching 5 million visits within a few weeks. United, having stonewalled Carroll for over a year, was forced to scramble to contain a PR crisis.

Why was Carroll's protest such a success? It certainly was a catchy song and a cute video, but it was music to the ears of everyone who has ever had a bad experience with an airline.

 And, in an age of tight cost control and paranoia, that's just about everyone who has ever flown – in spite of the fact that, according to J.D. Power and Associates, standards of on-time arrival and length of flight delays have steadily been improving. Like the TTC, United didn't appreciate the new environment, but at least it didn't make the mistake of trying to fight back.

All this puts companies in an impossible position. Under tight cost constraints, how could United have prevented the Dave Carroll fiasco? And how could the TTC ensure that there is never a single disgruntled passenger out there who is willing to turn his or her own complaint – whether legitimate or otherwise – into a PR nightmare?

It's a postmodern problem, and there are two, albeit imperfect, answers to it: let go and engage.

Let go of the illusion that you are the owner of your reputation. Your reputation, or brand, if you prefer, is the result of a multitude of forces, some of which you control (such as your own communications) and some of which you don't. People will make what they want to make of you, including the many hilarious versions of the sleeping ticket collector image that have found their way onto the web. If there is any consolation here, the blogosphere has a serious case of ADD, and will move onto something else soon.

But that doesn't mean you can just sit back and take a nap: you need to engage with your customers on the web. Ask yourself: "How would Apple handle this?" You can see that Apple is constantly communicating with its customers through mass media, the press and the Internet. If a crisis erupts, it is swamped in a strong brand image: Apple may have slipped up this time but they make good products and will fix the problem.

Other companies, such as Unilever, are masters at using the web to create buzz. Its Dove Campaign for Real Beauty again uses both mass media and the Internet: several of its ads were created for the web and not shown on television. Mock versions of these ads have appeared over and over again, but because Dove is actively taking part in a dialogue with its customers, they are not a concern: they are all part of the conversation.

If the TTC is like most, it will learn only the first of these two lessons: it will wait for everything to blow over and breathe a sigh of relief when it does. Or it will try to defuse the issue by referring everything to its blue ribbon panel.

But taking the initiative and engaging in a dialogue with its passengers are probably not on its route. That's too bad, for the TTC and for those who use it.

 

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